Eco-Printing

JoAnn and David Millen walk three miles daily in Halibut Point State Park that abuts their home, both for exercise and the inspiration it provides for JoAnn’s eco print designs.  She dyes fabric from concoctions of organic materials and metal junk. This is the story, in her own words.

JoAnn Millen in her dyeing studio

To begin my process I choose a light colored fabric like cotton, wool, or silk to print on.  

Blackberry leaves make a black or purple print. Here you see an oak leaf surrounded by rose. Onion skins give a wonderful ocher tint. They think I'm an eccentric over at Shaw's, because I clean out the onion bins for them. You have to be a dyer in order to understand.

I collect rose, blackberry, maple, sycamore, oak and many other assorted fallen leaves, bark, and sticks.  In the dye pot I include rusty metal objects for additional color and pattern.  Eucalyptus leaves can lend a nice red color.  

I'm especially proud of my rusty object collection and use certain pieces over and over because of the strong patterns they provide.  

Some of these things are golden. I was probably walking down a railroad track when I saw something like that. That's a real find.

After soaking the material briefly in iron water I wrap it with leaves and rusted metal. The string tie will leave a design of its own.

I put the bundle in a dye pot, add vinegar and let it simmer for two hours. Vinegar is the mordant. It facilitates color going into the fabric.

I was in the spice cabinet, and started adding spices to get these oranges and yellows. The little speckles come from black tea. 

After I remove and unroll my fabric I can identify the various leaves that I've used. The ones that do not print often lend what's called a resist which can be equally satisfying in the pattern.  Unrolling a bundle is a kind of surprise present. You don’t know exactly what you will get. Each piece is unique.

This vessel was built from wool rovings, water, and soap. I wrapped it with leaves and a copper pipe to make the patterns.  After removing it from the dye bath I shaped the piece into a vessel.  Shaping a vessel into this form can take hours.

 

The beauty of this art form is evident in the vessels, fabrics, and papers that can be fashioned the environment around us. Halibut Point is my inspiration point.  

There are times I use fabric as wrapping paper, a gift of the fabric itself.

Winter Finches

 

American Goldfinches

Male Goldfinches don't have the brilliant coloration they'll take on in breeding season but they liven up cedar trees (Juniperus virginiana) where they spend a lot of time in winter feeding on the little blue juniper 'berries', the female seed cones.

Goldfinches are primarily seed eaters. Lately they've become interested in privet berries.

They don't swallow the berries whole but appear to mash up the pulp to get at the seeds and crush them with their broadly conical bills.

Common Redpoll

Redpolls also forage in cedar trees but use their narrowly conical bills to find tiny bits of nourishment within the branchlets.

These birds, spritely like Chickadees in their acrobatic movements, make birch trees their favorite winter feeding stations.

Redpolls are able to extract seeds from the birch catkins with their sharp little bills.

Pine Siskin

Siskins are similarly equipped to probe for seeds within the scales of pine cones.

White-winged Crossbill

High up on a cedar tree this unusual visitor to Halibut Point surveys the landscape for its preferred food source. Crossbills have developed specialized beaks for a unique diet and harvesting technique.

Crossbills spend most of their time in spruce trees where they pry cones apart by biting and twisting with their bypassing hooked mandibles. They then extract seeds with their tongues. 

These examples of remarkable beak adaptations to specific food sources bring to mind Charles Darwin's observations on Galapagos finch morphology that anchored his theories of evolutionary development in Origin of Species.

Winter Sets In

 

In recent weeks while Halibut Point has hovered in a seasonal change of state, the surface of the quarry has vacillated between water and ice. 

Light snows accentuated rather than obscured traces of the granite industry.

Brief patterns appeared on quarry walls at the whim of wind and clouds and sun.

Water and air solidified where their currents met objects at the freezing point.

Ice formations drifted and collided like geologic plates forcing up miniature mountain ranges and valley rifts.

Immense processes crystallized within the ice layer much as the earth's geologic history was recorded in its crust and revealed in quarry excavations.

Mallards found sanctuary until ice closure forced them out to open ocean.

This week fox tracks crossed the surface of the quarry. 

An over-wintering Hermit Thrush tested its resilience in the snowy landscape.

What's there for a bird to eat, other than berries?

Getting through the winter here means finding food in harsh times with limited sources of survival. The species photographed recently at Halibut Point have adapted to dietary strategies mostly other than berries. The descriptions of their eating patterns come from the All About Birds website of Cornell University's Ornithology Lab.

White-breasted Nuthatch on a tree trunk

White-breasted Nuthatches eat mainly insects.... They probe into bark crevices or chip away at wood to find food. When they find large nuts and seeds, they jam them into the bark and hammer them open. White-breasted Nuthatches often store seeds and insects one at a time, and somewhat haphazardly, under loose bark on their territory. They typically hide the food by covering it with a piece of bark, lichen, moss, or snow.

American Tree Sparrow gleaning a field

Winter is the time to go looking for American Tree Sparrows. Despite their name, you'll probably find them foraging on the ground rather than feeding in trees....From fall through spring, they're almost exclusively vegetarian, eating grass, sedge, ragweed, knotweed, goldenrod, and other seeds, as well as occasional berries, catkins, insects, insect eggs, and larvae. In settled areas, they happily eat small seeds from feeders—including millet scattered on the ground.

Common Redpoll consuming seeds from birch catkins

Common Redpolls [an uncommon sight at Halibut Point] are active foragers that travel in busy flocks. Look for them feeding on catkins in birch trees or visiting feeders in winter. These small finches of the arctic tundra and boreal forest migrate erratically. Winter diet is largely birch and alder seeds.

Greater Scaup in the Halibut Point quarry

Greater Scaup eat aquatic invertebrates such as mollusks, insects, and crustaceans at the bottom of lakes and bays as well as aquatic plants, insects, and seeds.

Scaup diving

To capture aquatic invertebrates in soft muddy substrates, scaup stick their bill into the mud and quickly open and close it while swimming forward. They tend to forage in waters less than 7 feet deep, but can forage and dive up to 23 feet in deeper water.

Purple Sandpipers foraging at the shoreline

Purple Sandpipers breed on arctic tundra; they spend winters on North Atlantic shores, farther north than any other shorebird. Purple Sandpipers forage most heavily during falling tides....eating creatures unfamiliar to most people such as mussels, periwinkles, sea snails, worms, and small crabs and other crustaceans. —and indeed many of their prey items have only scientific names. They stand or walk slowly on rocks, searching for prey visually or simply inserting the bill into algae or wrack to detect prey by touch or taste. Often, they probe between barnacles or mussels for small prey items.

Peregrine Falcon perched on a promontory

Powerful and fast-flying, the Peregrine Falcon hunts medium-sized birds, dropping down on them from high above in a spectacular stoop. Peregrine Falcons eat mostly birds, of an enormous variety—450 North American species have been documented as prey, and the number worldwide may be as many as 2,000 species. They have been observed killing birds as large as a Sandhill Crane, as small as a hummingbird, and as elusive as a White-throated Swift. Typical prey include shorebirds, ptarmigan, ducks, grebes, gulls, storm-petrels, pigeons, and songbirds including jays, thrushes, longspurs, buntings, larks, waxwings, and starlings.